Igor Toronyi-Lalic is a critic, curator, cultural commentator and film-maker, who writes regularly on the arts for a variety of publications (including The Times and Sunday Telegraph). He is a co-founder of theartsdesk.com.

Let's have more booing at the opera

I love booing. Being a coward, I especially love to hear other people booing things that I would (if I weren't such a wimp) be booing myself. But I also love to see other people booing things that I'm not booing. So how jealous was I to have missed what sounded like a right royal tsunami of booing and jeering greeting the Royal Opera House's new production of Rusalkaon Monday.

It saddens me that the booing tradition only exists within opera. I sometimes like to boo paintings. Under my breath. Booing is for me what makes opera great. What elevates it above the other art forms. It's a link to a pre-Modernist, pre-de-haut-en-bas past, where art was not something to be handed down to the people, like benefits, but was something that the people engaged in, sang with, ate during and talked over.

It's not that I am by nature a mean-spirited person. It's just that nothing has the ability to galvanise your whole being (body and soul) than the sound of others shouting down something you've enjoyed. And vice versa. Booing makes you feel alive. When I hear boos, I'm immediately jolted out of my passive, middle-class slumber and forced to engage, forced to think, forced to make a decision, to support or oppose. I remember a production of Lucia di Lammermoor in Frankfurt, which was set in the German equivalent of Slough. The reception of the singers – which included a stunning early outing for the Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja – all went without hitch. And then out came the production team. Boos to the left of me. Boos to the right. One, two, three, four, five whole minutes of it. Thrilling!

The staging had left me a little exhausted and sleepy, but with this call to arms I was forced to properly test my physical first response. Patting my hands politely and slinking off to stuff my face was not an option. Did I really like it? Or not? Was I with the booers? Or against them? Whatever the faults of the production, I decided the staging was not that bad. I began to hoot like a monkey. The same thing happened a few years back after Christof Loy's psychological thriller of a Tristan und Isolde at the Royal Opera – a sea of booing provoking me into a panzer-attack of cheering.

Opera needs this immediate right of reply more than any other art form, considering the amount of public money it takes (and fritters away) and the sums that many audience members have spent (though, ironically, it is the rich who are often the most polite). It also needs it because there is otherwise no way to measure public opinion. In film, audiences vote with their feet. In opera and other heavily subsidised art forms, where there is no equivalent democratic check on quality, feedback is in short supply. Knowing when you've disappeared up your pompous intellectual backside (as seems to have happened with this Rusalka) is not easy. Opera needs its booers. And other art forms might benefit from a few themselves.